Hurricane Laura, which made landfall early Thursday morning in Louisiana, is actually the fourth hurricane of the 2020 season, but the first major one at a strength of 4 of the Saffir-Simpson scale. In July, two category 1 hurricanes, Hanna and Isaias, had made landfall in Texas and North Carolina.
Laura’s twin storm - Hurricane Marco - was also classified as a category 1 hurricane during Aug 23, but later weakened to a tropical storm before making landfall near the mouth of the Mississippi river.
While climate change has been identified as a reason why stronger hurricanes occur, the total number of hurricanes in a year remains quite unpredictable, as a look at data from 1967 until today shows. While there is no clear trend visible in the overall number of hurricanes, the number of those in categories 3-5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale has in fact increased from on average of around 1.6-1.7 per year in the 1970s and 1980s to an average of 3.0-3.6 per year in the 2000s and 2010s.
2005, when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, was the worst hurricane seasons since 1851, records from the National Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory at the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration show. Hurricane Katrina was just one of seven major hurricanes observed in the Atlantic basin that year, making almost half of all tropical cyclones in 2005 major hurricanes on the Saffir-Simpson scale. 2005 was the year with most hurricanes in the Atlantic (15), followed by 2010 (12), including Hurricane Sandy, and 1969 (also 12). In 1995, 11 hurricanes were observed, while ten were counted each year in 2017, 2012 and 1998.
While the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season had not yet begun, a first storm - Arthur -was named on May 15 after forming near the Bahamas. This made 2020 the sixth consecutive year that a named storm has formed before the start of the official season on June 1. Because of this new phenomenon, some experts have suggested pushing the beginning of the hurricane season forward by two weeks.
